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Artists’ Collectives Mostly in New York 197
women and expanded legal rights for all artists. This reform agenda was summarized,
reWned, and deranged during a freewheeling “Open Hearings” event
in which artists and critics spoke. 12
Like a “great spinning wheel,” as Jon Hendricks called it, the AWC
spun off and recirculated other artists’ groups. These included the band of
Puerto Rican artists who went on to found El Museo del Barrio and the group
of feminists called Ad Hoc Women Artists that struck the Whitney Museum.
Faith Ringgold recalled the scene at the coalition meeting space, Museum:
A Project for Living Artists. This was a big loft space on lower Broadway
where artists, both famous and unknown, sat around in a circle. “To Wnd out
what was really going on in the art world, you had to go.” 13
The AWC was taken seriously by established interests because it
included so many prominent artists and critics. Among them were minimal
sculptor Carl Andre, technology artist and Zero group member Hans Haacke,
Sol Lewitt, critic Lucy Lippard, 14 and curator Willoughby Sharp. Its emergence
marked the beginning of a period of substantial change in art institutions
in New York City. The AWC itself split in early 1970. One faction
merged with the movement against the Vietnam War, while another faction
persisted for many years. The Art Workers Community was an artists’
service organization, offering insurance and a credit union and publishing
the Art Workers News. (This AWC echoed the still-extant Artists Equity,
an outgrowth of artists’ organizing during the 1930s.) 15
While the 1969 coalition quickly grew to include many different
kinds of artists, the Art Workers Coalition was started by cosmopolitan technology
artists. Takis (who today lives in Greece) and the German-born
Haacke were certainly familiar with artists’ uses of collectivity. In Europe,
the Zero group was an international avant-garde. The world of technology
art was based in research science and technology, with strong academic connections
like the venturesome program at MIT. Within the movement, collective
work was understood as necessary because of the highly specialized
nature of technology. This more productivist mode of collectivity was supported
by the funds and inXuenced by the mores of business and government.
16 Before institutional interest in “tech art” dried up, groups like Pulsa
and USCO, with one foot in academic departments and the other in the
counterculture, produced complex technology-based environments in popular
museum shows around the United States.
The tradition of the techno-art collaborative was forcefully revived
in the 1980s with the Survival Research Laboratories, based in San Francisco.
Fronted by Mark Pauline, SRL performance work was distributed on video
by the group Target. SRL toured robots, made from chopped lawnmower
and chainsaw engines and other industrial parts, which were controlled in